Part 35 (1/2)
”I want no more of their medicine,” she said one day to Renaud. ”They might do very well for swamp fever, but there is something else the matter with me. It was my heart that you drowned. I never could believe you again; it is much better that I should die.”
She had explained nothing to her father or grandmother.
”They would have turned you out of the house,” she said, ”and I wanted to see you to the end.”
Her journey to the Icard farm, her nocturnal flight, her accident, all were attributed to an attack of fever, which was supposed to have been responsible for her actions, whereas, on the contrary, her illness was the result of them all.
Renaud, by a desperate effort, mastered his pa.s.sion at last. Was it forever? He chose to think so, because it was necessary that it should be so, in order to keep her alive.
He tried not to think of the other. He tried to repent. Every moment he tore from his mind by an exertion of his will--as he would tear up gra.s.s with his hand--some one of his memories. He told amusing stories, pretending to laugh loudest at them.
His heart was filled with a great pity for Livette, but, for all that, you would not have had to lift a very large stone to find there, in a spot that he knew well, the sleeping viper.
”I shall die, I shall die!”--Livette often said, ”but I want to see the fete of Saintes-Maries once more. I want to live till then. You must carry me there and lay me on the relics; that is where I want to die. And at my burial, I want the drovers, your comrades, to follow on horseback--promise me this--with their spears reversed, like the soldiers I saw at Avignon one day, marching to the cemetery, holding their guns that way.”
With a sort of gaiety, she often recurred to the subject of her burial, and embellished it with other details, saying, with the air of a playful child:
”There must be lilies, as there are in the procession at Saintes-Maries when they go to bless the sea; I want lots of lilies!
Lilies are so pretty and white! they are so proud on their stalks, and they smell so sweet!”
Meanwhile, the season was hastening away; the months came and went, like the same months in years past for centuries.
Summer set the sky and land and sea ablaze, drawing the last drop of moisture from the swamps, sowing the venomous seeds of miasma in the heavy air that people breathed. The crops ripened; then came the harvest. It was autumn. The redbreast sang in the park of the Chateau d'Avignon. The nights grew long once more. The leaves fell. The sad days of the year began.
The b.u.t.tercups had disappeared. The Vaccares, which had been dry all summer, no longer exposed to the sun its lovely mouse-gray bed; it was once more a sea. The light golden tint of the September sky was long since hidden from sight behind the rising mists.
The birds of pa.s.sage began anew their flight over the mirror-like island which promised them abundant prey. The eagle hurried from the Alps to make war upon the fish-hawks. And at night, when the wind howled and the rain fell in torrents, the storks and cranes and geese pa.s.sed over in triangular flocks, at a great height in the drenched atmosphere, uttering cries like cries of alarm.
Livette's suffering became more intense. She pa.s.sed whole days sitting at her window.
One evening, Renaud was sitting beside her, in silence, while the grandmother and Pere Audiffret were dining in the room below. The room was dimly lighted by a lamp. Suddenly Livette sprang to her feet, then fell back, crying:
”There she is! there she is! No! no! don't go with her! I don't want you to! no, no, Jacques!”
Renaud also had risen, and was staring vacantly at Livette; following the direction of her gaze, he began to tremble. Outside the window stood a pale, uncertain, but very recognizable spectre, the gipsy herself! He had no sooner recognized her than she disappeared, after making a significant sign to him, that said: ”Come!”
It was not a vision of the sick girl's imagination, for he, too, had seen it!
Perhaps the fever-laden island had sown its poison in the blood of both. The germs of fever were taking root and flouris.h.i.+ng in them. The blight of the _paluns_ implanted in their brains, as in a cloudy mirror, the image everlastingly repeated of the familiar plaintive objects of the desert, with which the current of their thoughts was mingled.
”Don't go! don't go! my Jacques!”
She dragged herself along the floor on her knees, shaken with sobs, imploring the drover, as she clung with both hands to his jacket.
The father and grandmother had hastened to the room.
The father, too, was sobbing, and knew not what to do. The grandmother slowly seated herself by the bed on which Renaud had gently laid Livette.
Calm and silent, the old woman gazed long and with a beautiful expression of perfect trust upon the copper crucifix and the images of the saints that hung on the wall of the recess.